many.

CHAPTER II

THE CIPHER WITH THE INVOICE

Red Tabs' sphinx-like declaration was no riddle to me. I knew at once
that Francis must be on secret service in the enemy's country and that
country Germany. My brother's extraordinary knowledge of the Germans,
their customs, life and dialects, rendered him ideally suitable for any
such perilous mission. Francis always had an extraordinary talent for
languages: he seemed to acquire them all without any mental effort, but
in German he was supreme. During the year that he and I spent at
Consistorial-Rat von Mayburg's house at Bonn, he rapidly outdistanced
me, and though, at the end of our time, I could speak German like a
German, Francis was able, in addition, to speak Bonn and Cologne
_patois_ like a native of those ancient cities--ay and he could drill a
squad of recruits in their own language like the smartest _Leutnant_
ever fledged from Gross-Lichterfelde.

He never had any difficulty in passing himself off as a German. Well I
remember his delight when he was claimed as a fellow Rheinlaender by a
German officer we met, one summer before the war, combining golf with a
little useful espionage at Cromer.

I don't think Francis had any ulterior motive in his study of German.
He simply found he had this imitative faculty; philology had always
interested him, so even after he had gone into the motor trade, he used
to amuse himself on business trips to Germany by acquiring new dialects.

His German imitations were extraordinarily funny. One of his "star
turns", was a noisy sitting of the Reichstag with speeches by Prince
Buelow and August Bebel and "interruptions"; another, a patriotic oration
by an old Prussian General at a Kaiser's birthday dinner. Francis had a
marvellous faculty not only of _seeming_ German, but even of almost
looking like a German, so absolutely was he able to slip into the skin
of the part.

Yet never in my wildest moments had I dreamt that he would try and get
into Germany in war-time, into that land where every citizen is
catalogued and pigeonholed from the cradle. But Red Tabs' oracular
utterance had made everything clear to me. Why a mission to Germany
would be the very thing that Francis would give his eyes to be allowed
to attempt! Francis with his utter disregard of danger, his love of
taking risks, his impish delight in taking a rise out of the stodgy
Hun--why, if there were Englishmen brave enough to take chances of
that kind, F